Word processors like Microsoft Word and Apple's own Pages software are just dandy if you want to write a college paper or fax a cover sheet, but their focus is on page layout and text formatting. Text editors are an entirely different story. Text editors are much more helpful if you're editing code, creating web pages, doing text transformation or other things for which a word processor is just overkill. Here's a roundup of the best ones you can get for your Mac at the moment. Also, if you're looking for editing software for the iPad, make sure to check out our roundup. To start the list, here's a roundup of three free text editors that I think are worth your time.

Each of them caters to a different audience: Brackets is great for the DIY crowd, while TextWrangler is a great multi-purpose general text editor. TextMate 2 has a lot of fans that prefer it to TextWrangler's big brother, BBEdit, for aesthetic and occasionally philosophical reasons. Brackets is an open-source text editor aimed at web designers and developers, and it's actually maintained by Adobe, of all people. It's developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and as the developers put it, 'if you can code in Brackets, you can code on Brackets.' And that's largely the idea: developers more than anyone have an idea of how they want to work, so why not provide them with a framework to do so? The software features a quick inline editor so you can view your changes on the fly, thumbnail image previews, navigation and debugging tools, and more.

It's an early release and very much a work in progress, but if you want to customize a text editor to do your bidding, Brackets is a good place to start. Free - TextMate 2. TextMate won the hearts and minds of app and web developers for having feature like nested scopes, folding code sections, project management, regex-based search and replace and more. The app's developer, Allan Odgaard, had long promised a 2.0 release but never delivered, then late in 2011 he made available a public build. Then in 2012 something amazing happened: Odgaard released TextMate 2 as open source.

He said he had long wanted to, he said, but Apple's restrictions on how apps can work on the Mac App Store pushed him over the edge. So the Mac App Store's loss is your gain. Free - TextWrangler. Bare Bones Software's BBEdit is the 800 pound gorilla of Mac text editors, and no wonder - it's been around forever, it seems. TextWrangler is BBEdit's 'little brother,' based around the same core text editing technology and designed for anyone that needs a text editing and transformation tool.

BBEdit offers much more extensive web authoring and software development tools, but that's not to say that TextWrangler skimps on features: you get grep-style search and replace, AppleScript support, authenticated saves, extensive FTP/SFTP support and much more. Free Here are three exceptional text editors that will cost you a little bit, but provide absolutely amazing capabilities depending on your needs. Bare Bones Software's business has been built on the enduring success of BBEdit - its flagship text editor has been around for 22 years and is still going strong.

BBEdit was originally designed as a programmer's utility for writing code, but has been modified in the intervening years to become an excellent web page editing tool as well. The software features syntax highlighting for dozens of different languages, it's scriptable and recordable using AppleScript, features Perl-compatible regex support, sports built-in debugging tools, FTP and SFTP support, supports version control using CVS, Perforce and Subversion and has hundreds of more features besides. It is, quite frankly, overkill for many users, but for those of us who need it, it's indispensible. $49.99 - Coda 2. Most of the other text editors on this list are general purpose tools that can be used by someone developing an application or writing source just as much as someone working on a web site. Panic's Coda 2 is a horse of a different color: it's specifically designed to act as a text editor for web developers and designers. Coda started out a simplified way to write web code and get it to where it needed to go - it combined editing, FTP client, a web preview engine and, if need be, command line terminal access.

Panic's moved Coda way beyond that with the new release - the editor adds features like code folding, the UI has been reworked, source code can be managed with either Git or SVN, a new MySQL editor is available, and much more - more than 100 new features in all. Coda 2 has a gorgeous, easy to use interface that makes your web page writing and tuning a breeze. It also works marvelously with Panic's companion iPad app, cheekily named Diet Coda. $74.99 - Sublime Text 2. Sublime Text 2 is billed as 'a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose,' making it the only one on this list that recognizes plain old wordsmiths as worth of love from the text editing crowd too.

It has an attractive user interface and neat features like the ability to make multiple selections and changes at the same time. I have to admit, when I began researching this topic, I'd never heard of Sublime Text 2, but after reading some forceful comments promoting it, I looked it up - it's pretty slick.

I especially like Sublime Text 2's 'distraction free mode,' a full screen mode that focuses on just your text on the screen and nothing else. Other cool features include split editing, a hideable command palette, and a very fair cross-platform per-user license that lets you pay for it once but use it on as many computers as you like, whether they be Mac, Windows or Linux. While you are required to pay for it, you can download and use it to test it out without penalty.

A new 3.0 version is currently in development, with boatloads more features. $70 - This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list of text editors for the Mac, just a few of my favorites that I think are worth your attention. I imagine you have other ones that I may have missed, so please tell me about them in the comments.

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Advertisement A few days ago I decided to start working on a school assignment; just some basic HTML stuff. My initial response to fire up Notepad proved useless, as I had moved to Mac OS X a few weeks ago. Unwilling to fire up my Windows emulation, I went looking for an alternative coding text editor. To clarify, with code-writing applications, I mean (free) text editors that are willing to highlight your code – compilation and validation optional, but often included. I discovered two things during that search. Dru 100c drivers for mac.

Firstly, Mac OS X has far less software alternatives than Windows, but second, nearly all of them are decent applications. Not having to sift through all that junk, I was quickly set up with a number of excellent coding text editor alternatives. We’ll start out with a rather advanced application. If you want something lighter, check the application below, or scroll down to the bottom of the article for some additional recommendations. Komodo Edit (based on Komodo IDE) is built on the Mozilla code base, and offers the same extendability. That’s right – you can download extensions for this one.

Whatever the flavor, you’ll be able to fit Komodo Edit to your personal taste. Oh, and did I mention that it’s also available for Windows and Linux?

Komodo Edit offers syntax coloring and syntax validation, but the application also adds multi-language file support, autocomplete and Vi emulation to the package. If you’re a sucker for extra functionality, you’re right at home with Komodo Edit.

Best Programming Editor For Mac

The coding text editor I ended up using is Smultron. Now mind, there’s a reason why I didn’t start the article with it. The developer, Peter Borg, has discontinued the work on the application. For now, you are still greeted by a near-blank page with a short explanation and the download links, but there is no guarantee of how long the application will remain available, or supported. For now though, Smultron remains a great coding application. Comprehensive and accessible for beginners (like me), but also housing a number of tools for the more advanced user. Included are HTML, plist and XML validators, Java compilers, and several converters.

Syntax highlighting is of course included for most popular (and unpopular) programming languages. Vim is one of the older, and also more popular coding text editors in Linux. It’s open source and famous for being text-controllable.

Best Code Editor For Mac 2016

In other words, it hasn’t got a Graphical User Interface by default. MacVim is a port of Vim to the Mac OS X platform. And yes, it does have a GUI (phew). Since all the work on MacVim is done by ‘fans’, the application is usually a little behind on the official application. Just a little, though – MacVim tends to be quick on the ball, and is a rock solid text/coding application. At the core, MacVim is very similar to the official application, save that it comes with OS X support, and a few added bonuses. It’s loaded with incredible features, but often needs a bit of trickery to get the most out of it.

Learning to work with the application isn’t too hard, but its audience consists for the biggest part out of advanced users. Also noteworthy is the license; MacVim is released as charity-ware. In other words, if you like the application, they encourage you to support needy. Other mentionworthy coding text editor alternatives are. What do you use to write your code? Let us know your preferred applications in the comments! Explore more about:,.